The Literary Channel

by Cohen, Margaret; Dever, Carolyn

• ISBN13: 9780691050027
• ISBN10: 0691050023
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-12-26
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

The Literary Channeldefines a crucial transnational literary "zone" that shaped the development of the modern novel. During the first two centuries of the genre's history, Britain and France were locked in political, economic, and military struggle. The period also saw British and French writers, critics, and readers enthusiastically exchanging works, codes, and theories of the novel. Building on both nationally based literary history and comparatist work on poetics, this book rethinks the genre's evolution as marking the power and limits of modern cultural nationalism. In the Channel zone, the novel developed through interactions among texts, readers, writers, and translators that inextricably linked national literary cultures. It served as a forum to promote and critique nationalist clicheacute;s, whether from the standpoint of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the insurgent nationalism of colonized spaces, or the non-nationalized culture of consumption. In the process, the Channel zone promoted codes that became the genre's hallmarks, including the sentimental poetics that would shape fiction through the nineteenth century. Uniting leading critics who bridge literary history and theory,The Literary Channelwill appeal to all readers attentive to the future of literary studies, as well as those interested in the novel's development, British and French cultural history, and extra-national patterns of cultural exchange. Contributors include April Alliston, Emily Apter, Margaret Cohen, Joan DeJean, Carolyn Dever, Lynn Festa, Franccedil;oise Lionnet, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Sharon Marcus, Richard Maxwell, and Mary Helen McMurran.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	1	(34)
Margaret Cohen
Carolyn Dever
PART I The Novel without Borders	35	(114)
Transnationalism and the Origins of the (French?) Novel	37	(13)
Joan DeJean
National or Transnational? The Eighteenth-Century Novel	50	(23)
Mary Helen McMurran
Sentimental Bonds and Revolutionary Characters: Richardson's Pamela in England and France	73	(33)
Lynn Festa
Sentimental Communities	106	(27)
Margaret Cohen
Transnational Sympathies, Imaginary Communities	133	(16)
April Alliston
PART II Imagining the ``Othered'' Nation	149	(137)
Phantom States: Cleveland, The Recess, and the Origins of Historical Fiction	151	(32)
Richard Maxwell
Gender, Empire, and Epistolarity: From Jane Austen's Mansfield Park to Marie-Therese Humbert's La Montagne des Signaux	183	(11)
Francoise Lionnet
The (Dis)locations of Romantic Nationalism: Shelley, Stael, and the Home-Schooling of Monsters	194	(31)
Deidre Shauna Lynch
``An Occult and Immoral Tyranny'': The Novel, the Police and the Agent Provocateur	225	(26)
Carolyn Dever
Comparative Sapphism	251	(35)
Sharon Marcus
Afterword From Literary Channel to Narrative Chunnel	286	(9)
Emily Apter
Selected Bibliography	295	(8)
Contributors	303	(2)
Index	305